Korrlok Week: Frozen
by spockandawe
Summary: Korrlok Week, Day 4: Frozen. Tarrlok has survived the explosion and wakes up in a hospital bed back in Republic City.
1. Chapter 1

Korrlok Week, Day 4: Frozen

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His dreams were filled with fire, water, and pain. Sometimes he managed to claw his way to wakefulness, struggling upward through the suffocating waves to steal a breath of air and a glimpse of light. Sometimes _she_ was there, and he was able to think just long enough to decide that this must just be another layer of the dream before he slid back beneath the water. Slowly, the waking moments grew longer and longer, and the pain expanded to fill his awareness until it became impossible to put it out of his mind. The first time he was completely aware of himself the agony was so overwhelming he couldn't even bring himself to move. When he tried to open his mouth there was a surge of pain on the right side of his face. He managed not to cry out, but closed his eyes and tried to breathe deeply as he drifted back beneath the water.

The next time he woke, she was there. He didn't speak and neither did she, though she clearly saw that he was conscious. He didn't try to move, but his eyes followed her as she slowly moved around the room, taking care of little tasks. When she brought a bowl of water to the bedside and turned up the sheet over his right leg the breath caught in his throat. The skin - could he really call it skin anymore? - was stretched and unnervingly shiny, and it was far, far too red. The boat. The glove. He had survived somehow. The tightness on his face made sense now. At least he'd survived with all his limbs intact. As she bent the water over his leg the pain eased a little and he drifted back to sleep, watching her until his eyes closed.

She was sometimes there and sometimes wasn't when he was awake. They exchanged brief words occasionally. He couldn't read her expression, even when her hands hovered just above his cheek and her eyes were focused intently on his face. Did she treat him because she wanted to or because she felt like she had to? Why had she saved him? He still couldn't decide whether giving him life was mercy or punishment. As the days crept past, the healings began to make a difference in the pain, but what he could see of the right side of his body was as scarred and ruined as it had always been. The only problem was that although she treated him over and over, she'd never healed his arm while he was awake, and it hurt more than the rest of the burns did. Finally one day he managed to mumble a plea to heal his arm, or at least take the pain away from his hand.

Although her face had been largely blank the whole time she'd been treating him, it twisted into something unrecognizable and she turned away for several seconds. When she turned back, it looked like she was trying to hold back tears. He couldn't understand. He could feel the pain in his hand and fingers. Anything she could do to heal them would be better than what he was living with now. When she took the top of the sheet and folded it down, it took him a long moment to understand. His shoulder was bare and covered with the same red scars he'd seen on the rest of his body, but his arm just... ended. In the space where there should have been an elbow, a forearm, a hand, there was nothing. He could feel it, he would have sworn that he was moving his fingers, but there was no other way to interpret what he saw. His arm was gone.

He looked up at Korra, begging her without words to tell him that his eyes lied, that he was wrong about what he'd seen. She turned away, silently bending the water up to heal the stump of his arm. He closed his eyes and gasped for air as she bent her head to her work. It was too much. He cried quietly, tears streaming from his closed eyes. He could feel them running down his left cheek, but from his right side there was nothing. As he began to sink into merciful oblivion, he felt surprisingly gentle fingers brush the tears from his face and tenderly stroke his hair.


	2. Chapter 2

Surprise sequel chapter! I couldn't get this story out of my head and wrote this follow-up before deciding there was actually a long-form story tucked away in here. After this, I ditched these two chapters, worked out plot/motivations/everything, and started over from scratch. This became my story 'A Crooked House.' Even though it has some major differences from this, I like both versions of the story and think these two chapters stand well on their own.

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Sometimes he longed for the first days, when he had been able to pass the time in simple unconsciousness. Now sleep is a rare gift and he spends hours each night staring at the ceiling, barely aware of when he dozed off and slipped back into wakefulness. In the days he watches the door. Servants moved in and out of the apartment occasionally, but they made no attempt to address him and he could not muster the energy to address them. They were afraid of him, that was plain enough. Often it was easiest to close his eyes and feign sleep so he didn't have to see the frightened sideways looks as they walked through his room. When they were gone he would watch the door again, waiting for her.

Korra did not talk much more than the servants at first, but as the days passed on she moved from simply answering his questions to casually addressing him. After he had learned of the loss of his arm, she had made an effort to fill the heavy silence with easy conversation. He still wasn't able to do much better than mumble through the burns, but focusing on forming the words with stiff, uncooperative lips was a welcome distraction from the pain that even drugs could not fully dull. When she'd pieced together the story of how he'd washed up on the shore burned almost beyond recognition, he thought she relaxed a bit more and even looked at him with a touch of admiration.

She told him that almost two days had passed between when Amon disappeared and when he was found on the shore just outside the city. When his rescuers had brought him to the healers and he'd been recognized, they didn't let him die but nobody stepped forward to do any more. The wounded soldiers of the Navy needed more healers than they had, so nobody spared any energy for the traitor bloodbender. Unfortunately, that delay meant that his recovery would be longer, more painful, and less complete than it would have otherwise been. He could see the scarring that covered his remaining arm and guessed that the rest of his body didn't look much better.

She came to heal him and talk to him at least once a day, and after a while she guessed that he should be able to sit upright. He rolled to his side and struggled to push himself up on his elbow, but his head swam and he nearly collapsed to the side of the bed. She caught him gently by the shoulders and slipped under his arm to ease him up slowly. She sat there on the bedside to support him as he closed his eyes and breathed deeply, focusing on not passing out. When he had steadied she asked if she could treat his back. He'd scarcely felt the pain there before, but as he shifted it burned and ached like the rest of his body.

She turned to kneel on the edge of the bed, still supporting him with an arm across his chest. She watched over his shoulder as she bent water from the bowl on the bedside table and moved it over his wounds. A blessed coolness followed her hands as she worked and he slumped forward again, this time more from relief than from pain. As he held onto her waist for support, she apologized that she'd been afraid about moving him too much in the early days, so she hadn't been able to heal his back very well. When she finished, he felt better than he had since the explosion.

He was exhausted, but she persuaded him to stay sitting long enough to change his clothes and bandages. He should have felt embarrassed at the way she stripped him down, but he was too tired to do more than focus on not falling over. Before she redressed his wounds, she got the bowl of water and a sponge. She carefully washed him off, moving especially gently over the worst of the scars. As soon as she'd applied fresh poultices and bandages, she slipped under his shoulder again to ease him back down to the bed. As he relaxed she took the fingers of his hand, massaging them and slowing moving them back and forth, stopping whenever she felt him tense with pain. She spoke without needing an answer, explaining the different aspects of burn treatment and the steps they would take to his recovery. He listened, but as he began to fall asleep the words ran together in his head. His last memory before he drifted off was the soothing murmur of her voice as she carefully treated his hand.


End file.
